China is easy to like and difficult to love.

It wasn’t until the home stretch of my 一年多 that I decided I wasn’t just being impressed anymore. That I felt like I’d sort of cracked the introductory levels (and that I shouldn’t expect to go any higher even if I were to stay there for a decade). By the time I left I wasn’t feeling it was quite as necessary to keep qualifying any statement I made about China by saying, “but China is huge and I’ve only seen a part of it so what do I know?”. 

The surface got itself scratched. Have some photographic proof:

Visited in 2016: Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Qingdao, Chengdu, Jiuzhaigou, Harbin, Nanjing